


That Which Endures

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-02
Updated: 2011-08-02
Packaged: 2017-10-22 03:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/233367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davesprite and Jade stretch the literalization of video game metaphors to its limit, and have some Feelings about mortality, in a roundabout kind of way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Which Endures

There was a time when Dave would have said with great certainty that you can’t actually write a patch for the universe. But Jade Harley has never had much truck with other people’s certainties.

She perches (ha ha ha) on the Forge’s lip, heels braced against sheer volcanoface, hands blurring over the keyboard on her knees. It’s a good thing Dave has got hover, because he’s pretty sure if he touched her, right then, she wouldn’t notice, and he’s not sure he could stand that: but there’s no room on this fucking conksuck baking soda and hope volcano of hers not to touch her, no place to rest his weary, ectoplasmic, really kind of embarrassingly ill-defined ass area that wouldn’t end with her shoulder skimming his. Or, you know. Her elbow half-submerged in the clear goo of his ribs. Whatever. Shit’s awkward, is the point.

Her fingers are mottled with cold. He kind of wants to take them and stick them into his armpit, like he used to do with Rose when she wasn’t on guard for it, when there was nothing but fucking wind and shade and the chiaroscuro architecture of her bared wrist. But, you know. He gets that that’s not a thing you do when there’s more than one other person in the world. He totally does. Also, it’s not like it would do any good. The faint buzz of energy along his adjacent surfaces might be fuzzy, but it sure as hell isn’t warm.

He could stick her hand into his wingpit instead, he considers.

“Have you thought that maybe importing shitty enormous monsters into our beautiful nebula baby isn’t a great idea,” he says, hovering.

She says: “Duuhhh,” her mouth going round and protruberant as the track’s eighteenth golf hole, all fresh and ready to be run home with a hellaciously daring spike. “But this is the only way, Dave!”

“Uh huh,” he says. It isn’t like they haven’t had this conversation some-thematically-large-number of times. Even if it wasn’t always him and her, exactly. They’ve had it.

“Besides,” says Jade, her expression shifting to Slyer Than An (Internet, Kawaii) Fox mode, “I’m not working on them right now. Jeez.”

“You… aren’t?” he says, blankly, and then, “Okay, well, I hate to like, pressure you and shit, but aren’t we kind of on a tight schedule here? Circulation-cut-off, maybe-decking-my-hands-out-in-whimsical-colored-bands-of-shit-wasn’t-such-a-good-idea tight, even.”

“Puh-lease, we have oodles of time,” says Jade. “Now that we know what we need to do, we basically have all the time! All of it. Plus, this is important, too.”

“What are you working on, then,” says Dave, folding his arms.

“The patch to import Jaspers,” says Jade, “and Nannasprite, and Jadesprite,” and her smile burns white, like the glimmer of a dead girl’s opening eye, “and you. Speaking of, do you have any special requests?”

Her eyebrows perform the traditional mating dance of the anthropomorphic caterpillar. If caterpillars mate. Well, anthropomorphic ones probably do a lot more than that, so.

Dave unfolds his arms. He can tell he’s going to need both hands for this. He raises them in the traditional attitude of the supplicant who is prepared, though not eager, to be thrown into the slammer for his sins, so long as it means not being heavily perforated. (You know, again.)

“Whoa, fuck, what.”

Jade gives him a look like maybe he’s going to get perforated anyway.

“Special requests like ‘gosh, Jade, thanks for thinking of everything, now would you please install like six personal computers on my person, because personal computers are super useful and you can never have enough to hand!’”

“Oh my god,” says Dave, “okay, okay, I’ve got one, how about no installing shit in me, what the actual fuck.”

“It was just a suggestion,” says Jade. Now she’s starting to look less like she might turn into a swarm of angry bullets. Now she looks like a sad and tired Jade Harley, who is one of his best friends and believes she can save him.

“But,” he says, and there are probably other words that should go here, but, “I’m still doomed.”

“Yeah, well,” says Jade, head lifting, “that was going to be the subject of my second suggestion, dumbass.”

The Harleyora borealis reflects greenly off her glasses, its curvature deep and soft even in miniature, knotted up in the curve of each lens. It looks pale, totally weaksauce, laid over the glossed green of her eyes.

She never called him dumbass in all the time he imagined that she was there, talking to him, that her next message was already typed and waiting to be sent on the other end of the line and in just one more minute it would flash into the window. He thinks she might have changed more in a day than he did in four months (nine months and thirteen days, nonlinearly). It’s nice. Even if fucking trolls helped her do it, their weird stubby alien fingers all up in her grill in the best traditions of extraterrestrial vegetarian burgers.

“That’s a thing you can do?” says Dave, slowly.

Jade makes a noise that’s halfway between a scoff and a, like, affirmative grunt. “Totally. I mean, normally no one would tamper with these subroutines, because they’re integral to the coherence of paradox space- but like Sollux said, we’re fucking this shit up anyway!”

“Okay,” says Dave. “I- Okay.”

“Okay,” says Jade. “So. Requests, Mr. Cool Guy?”

And she reaches out and plants a hand over the place where he was sword, once, the pressure of her palm muted through the bandage but discernibly reshaping his mass, still, pushing ripples of jelly out through his middle. The light that still leaks, thin and sharp, from the wound, paints her stupidly naked forearm in gold.

“We have,” she whispers, “time,” and she makes a horrifying little gesture, like she’s sliding invisible sunglasses up over her glasses, and he thinks he can almost see the shadow of them on her face.

Bluh bluh, huge witch. Right.

“What is it you can do,” he says, even though he knows what the answer will be.

And she says it: “Anything. This is going to rebuild you, Dave! I can put the sword back, if you want. I can make it so that you were never a sword at all! I can give you an insatiable craving to build snowmen.”

She laughs.

“Jesus,” he says, “just, please, stop brainstorming, oh my god. Okay. Okay.”

She looks expectant. There is snow in her hair, and what might or might not be stars.

”Look,” he says, “is this even going to be me?”

“Of course it is,” Jade says, frowning. “I’m copying directly from your source code, it-“

“I didn’t ask if it was going to look like me, talk like me, or be almost as unbearably cool as me give or take a misplaced personal computer,” says Dave, and plows on even though Jade is making a face at him and he just wants, he wants so badly to laugh and come up with increasingly ridiculous ideas for self-improvement, because- because he needs to know, that’s all. First. He made his choice, already, he just wants to know.

He thinks abruptly of his sister- his sister, that is, the one he left behind. Not the one who left them all. Is there a chance it’ll continue to exist, and I’ll just be here alone forever? His mouth tastes like cooling lava. Ozone clings to his gums.

“I asked if it was going to be me.”

“It’ll be Dave,” says Jade. Her shrug is a thing of terrible, bucktoothed grace.

Dave is silent.

“I’m sorry,” says Jade, “I guess you didn’t really want me to say that. But… Dave, he’ll have your memories, and he’ll think like you think, except about snowmen. I’m not really sure, how consciousness works, or if it transfers. I’m not really sure it’s going to be me, after the Scratch. That’s not the kind of thing anyone can guarantee!”

Dave thinks maybe it would have been better if he’d been forced to sit with her after all. Then he might not have had to look directly at her, her bright face.

“Okay,” he says.

“When I was a little girl,” says Jade, “my grandfather took me to Disneyland once, as a special treat.”

At any other time he would lap this shit up with embarrassing fervor, but, “Listen, Harley, I’m not really feeling the cute anecdote-“

“Shhhh, I’m trying to tell you something,” says Jade, and it occurs to Dave that she still has one hand on his stomach, even as the other hand hunts and pecks like a superpowered chicken.

He waits.

“There was this ride,” says Jade, dreamily, “it was soooo coooool, Dave, I can’t even describe how cool, with pirates and beakers full of bubbling stuff and breakneck turns. And at one point, it looks like a door swings out across the track- it looks like you’re going to crash into the door!”

She’s not watching him for any trace of recognition, which is good, because he has no fucking idea what she’s talking about.

“And then it turns out the door was actually just the entrance to a dark tunnel,” Jade continues.

“With beakers.”

“No, silly, the beakers were earlier. Anyway. The important thing is, afterwards, my grandfather took me aside and said, actually, Jade, that wasn’t a tunnel at all! There was a terrible crash when the car reached the door, and you were killed. But it’s all right, because Disney kindly funded the making of a robot that looks just like you used to, a robot with all your memories and feelings. And that’s you!”

“That might actually be the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” says Dave, more or less sincerely. “Holy fuck, how did you ever let that dreambot stay in the same room with you?”

“Grandpa was a big joker,” says Jade. “Which makes sense, now that I think about it. That’s not really the important part either, though. The important part was that it was then I learned that, really, your consciousness could end at any moment! And you’d never know, and maybe something else, something totally different, would step in to take your place, and no one else would know, either. And maybe you are that something else! It doesn’t really matter, though, because it’s not the kind of thing that’s quantifiable, not even in my experiments. All you can do is keep going and try not to let the gnawing existential dread stop you from having fun. You know?”

“I know,” says Dave. The pain in his stomach seems to have clawed its way up to his chest, and he wonders if that’s going to start giving off a shitty sparkleglow, too.

“Also,” says Jade, “I don’t know if this patch will be, um, you, but I do know that I would miss the way you look, and the way you talk, and the way you are completely, unbearably cool.”

“Well, duh,” he says, “that was a given.” He feels like he’s speaking to her from far away, in lines of flashing text, long delayed.

She smiles, again, her teeth sliding over her lip.

“Awesome,” she says, drawing her hand back and cradling it, briefly, to her chest, where it stains one ear of her insignia orange. ”What do you think about a sword that is also a personal computer?” she says, and Dave begins to laugh.

“Sure,” he says, and almost is. “What the hell. And make it two, why don’t you. Or, you know. Make one a rifle, huh?”

“That’s a great idea,” says Jade, leaning forward until he can see the if clauses and semicolons of his whole future, trapped in her half-closed eyes.


End file.
